


Pressure

by KarkaHatchlings



Series: Guild Wars 2 Interstitial [14]
Category: Guild Wars 2 (Video Game), Guild Wars Series (Video Games)
Genre: Ancient History, Fluff, Gen, Magic, Magical Artifacts, Slice of Life, Undeath
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-22
Updated: 2018-10-22
Packaged: 2019-08-05 21:08:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,122
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16375037
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KarkaHatchlings/pseuds/KarkaHatchlings
Summary: The formation of Arah dungeon armor.





	Pressure

Things move slowly in the deep.  Disheveled by the arcane violence of the land’s plunge into the depths, its contents hung suspended in the water for moments, then sank, gurgling, to the shattered bottom.  Water closed at last over arches that had challenged the sky.

The inhabitants fluttered down as well, only so much detritus after the Vizier's desperate gambit.  Water rolled into lungs open for final screams and filled swelled chests, protecting them in death from depth that would have crushed air within to pinpoints.  Noble finery, waterlogged and weighty with golden thread, piled on pauper rags. Majestic jungle primate, crushed by falling tree, jumbled with drakes drowned at last, all refuge of shore long gone.  In the sinking shoals of corpses there was no division among those of the holy land. They were all Orrians.

Subtle currents snaked through the building layers of rubble; stone, wood, metal and flesh.  The tumble stirred together, finding crevices to fit, a morbid jigsaw never meant to be assembled.  Hands were thrust, unliving and unwilling, by impersonal vagaries of seawater into sleeves of potsherds.  Spines of timber and copper violated puffed and pustule-soft skin, driven by the blind, inexorable sifting of the piles.

Life remained, of a sort.  Not only the simulacrum, the motion of settling and compacting, or the stubborn magics of Orr still trying to serve the dead, lighting sunken streets and homes, but true life.  Braver and more desperate denizens of the deep crept through the newly arrived demesnes, plucking experimentally at the unresisting natives. Slower moving coral and crustacean found purchase as well, grasping tight to shattered mosaic, marble street and broken ring.

And time moved as well, but slowly.  Years accreted along with barnacles and coral, but the remains they grew and fed upon were stubborn, refusing to rot.  Preserved by the residue of magics strange and divine, they moldered, only partially sullied. Where once the gods had walked, tragic beauty could be found in small ways.  The golden drift of a woman's long hair in mild currents, still clinging to a waterlogged scalp. The stony, serene expressions of sunken statues, gazing into the wreckage heaped on them.  Ages might have made this the final tale told of Orr, but another violation lurked. Indeed, it had waited far longer.

As with all other things beneath the waves, it happened at a glacial pace, agonizing and inexorable.  Sea growths sickened, turning strange and twisted, glowing with eerie light. That which could flee did so, shoals of fish abandoning their tentatively held depths for cleaner waters.  With a slow, implacable sweep of tails and limbs, Orr's new master took up its throne.

For a time it lingered, blindly seeping its malignant power into all it touched.  Insensate but for an unending and terrible hunger, it tasted the returning richness of the world and the once-diminished magic whet that monstrous appetite with new bounty.  The elder dragon was a pressure all its own, a weight extending beyond the physical. Just like what life could not flee, the remains of Orr, once inviolable in death, began to change.

The remnants of the divine were the first to turn.  Ancient magic, laid down in ages past, twisted in on itself and festered, amplifying and spreading the dragon’s poison.  Crushed in a new sense by energies incomprehensible and dark, the living, dead, and inanimate began to fuse. Fingers hooked wretchedly, biting deep into the metal that had once bitten them, grasping hold blindly.  Mouths bereft of lips by hungry fish gnawed at nothing or shaped watery prayers to their new idol. Aberrant coral growths knit flesh and bone, rather than feeding on, digesting and replacing. The rubble shifted once more in the soundless dark as corpses stirred beneath it in tortured disquiet.  

Finally, the newfound restlessness extended even to the land.  With a heave as cataclysmic as the one that sank it long ago, Orr rose again.  Walls of water surged away from the festering coastlines, heralds sent to distant shores of the watery death that waited.  These tidal waves and the panic and terror they produced, however, were the only swift threat. Orr and its new master remained of the deep:  torpid, patient, content to exert a slow, crushing pressure and consume its prey in struggling fragments.

Across the silt-caked wasteland, the awful imitation of life resumed.  Peasants tilled at poisoned mud, nobles staggered across shattered courts, bowing at nothing at all.  The engines of war which had choked as they strove to meet the fury of the charr were kindled once more.  Dead hands beat awful amalgams of flesh and bone, coral and metal into arms and armor, each stamped with the corrupt likeness of that which lurked and hungered in the City of the Gods.

But things move swiftly on the surface.  The tiny creatures there, lacking any sense of the eons that plague the deep, roused themselves in horror at the drifting undeath claiming the oceans.  Squabbling powers, existing for but the merest fraction of time, united to fight monsters of rot and sinew with their own beasts of smoke and steel. Hybrid foundries belched airships into the sky to challenge Zhaitan's champions and in the end even their master was brought low.  The cruelly slow malignance was banished, for the moment, foiled by the inability of its victims to take the long view.

Just as quickly, adventurers descended upon the Holy City, ripping plunder and secrets from its tarnished and hallowed streets.  Unlike the deeps, they did not wait, they did not grind at obstacles, they did not slowly rot and chip away or corrupt. They smashed, they leapt and crawled through each gap, exploiting every advantage to the fullest in the mad search for riches.  The weapons and raiment of the foe were stolen, scattered across the surface of world, and turned to every purpose beneath the light of day.

Urik grunted as he tightened down the buckles of the vambrace around a thick forearm.  The leather was new, added by Hetja. The Risen it had been torn from had no need of straps, the metal half-subsumed into rotten flesh.  The charr clashed his forearms together and bone bleached coral clattered against dark metal. The depth-forged steel rang dully.

"What do you say?" he asked with a pleased growl.

Balrit's muzzle wrinkled when he looked away from the collection of scepters offered by Peacemaker Skrimm.  "Very protective I'm sure." A purple glimmer of illusion puffed dismissively to add art to a sniff that spoke volumes all on its own.

"That's what I was thinking!"  As usual, the nuance was lost on the larger, muddy-colored charr.  "Just wish it wasn't so expensive. Not like it took 'em long to make."

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted in /gw2g/.
> 
> Items and events referenced here correspond to in-game items and locations: prior to the reconstruction of Lion's Arch, dungeon equipment vendors were separate individuals.


End file.
